Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling” | AI Reality Check

0:00The last three years have been sort of exhausting for me.

0:04You know, as a computer scientist and a technology commentator, I was excited by ChatGPT when it was first released.

0:11I mean, the effectiveness of generative AI at both understanding and producing structured language was cool and unexpected.

0:20It was sort of like when you first saw that pinch to zoom feature on an early iPhone.

0:25So it seems self-evident to me that, hey, with enough experimentation, we would for sure find some impressive applications for large language models.

0:32And I was curious to learn what they would be.

0:36But then almost immediately, the discourse surrounding AI became cloaked in a mantle of dread and hype.

0:45A few months after ChatGPT's launch, for example, Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin published an alarming New York Times op-ed about what the arrival of this tool foretold.

0:55Here's what they wrote.

0:57AI's new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization.